Mapping Station Use in the 2011 NiceRide Season

To no small amount of clamor among the non-motorized community in the Twin Cities and nation at large, Nice Ride MN recently published their complete 2011 data. A few early cuts with Excel and ArcGIS reveal some interesting patterns.

Station Distribution

By the end of the 2011 season, there were 116 bike share stations in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The green bikes took a total of 217,530 trips in the 2011 season, a 123% increase from the 2010 season.

The duration of these trips was 70,619 hours, or an average of about 20 minutes for each trip. If we assume these bikes are traveling at 12 miles per hour, NiceRide bicyclists traveled 859,313 miles in the 2011 season.

August was the busiest month for NiceRide trips; 41,122 trips were made, or about 18.9% of all trips during the season.

Popular Origins and Destinations

The most popular station for trip origins and trip destinations was IDS Center in downtown Minneapolis, with 9,843 trips originating from IDS Center and 10,701 trips arriving at IDS Center during the 2011 season.

4 of the top 10 Origin-Destination Pairs during the 2011 season are within the U of M campus (6, if you consider that trips from the East Bank to Washington and Cedar in 7 Corners are likely U of M traffic as well). The most frequent trips made on NiceRide bikes are back and forth across the Washington Avenue bridge between Kolthoff Hall and Social Sciences.

The station with the most “round trips” (trips starting and ending at the same station) is Lake Street & Humboldt Ave, with 1,869 round trips in the 2011 season. 2 of the top 10 O-D pairs are round trips starting and ending by Lake Calhoun.

In October 2011, the University of Minnesota sponsored a successful grant application to the Bikes Belong Foundation on behalf of Sharing to Grow: a bike share station local economic activity study. The study seeks to identify and quantify economic activity centered around Nice Ride MN stations, as Nice Ride users experience unique accessibility patterns in relation to shops and restaurants with close proximity to these stations. The study will be useful in developing recommendations to federal and state governments and peer cities regarding impacts of bike share systems; and in guiding station placement and distribution in the Twin Cities to optimize economic impact through strategic improvements in accessibility. Look for a report out in June of 2012.

What does this data tell us about Nice Ride trips and mode shift? Some of Nice Ride's funding comes from pools of money that are related to the policy objective of reducing vehicle miles traveled. As this analysis shows, some of the most common origin-destination pairs for Nice Ride trips involved trips between parts of the U of M campus. It is unlikely that those trips are replacing motor vehicle trips. On the other hand, these trips might be replacing trips that would have otherwise occurred on the campus shuttle, which would indicate shift towards "active transportation" and physical activity, which is an objective of some of Nice Ride's other pools of funding from Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Would also be interesting to look at where the least used stations are, and what might that tell us about the effectiveness of Nice Ride's expansion strategy?

"The green bikes took a total of 217,530 trips in the 2011 season, a 123% increase from the 2010 season."

Does this control for the different number of bikes available in each season?

I like the idea of calculating the stations that gained and the stations that lost the most bikes. But what about the stations that had the most equal number of trips? Where are those stations, and why are they close to equal?